Gleanings from the web and the world, condensed for convenience, illustrated for enlightenment, arranged for impact...

While the OFFICE of President remains in highest regard at NewEnergyNews, this administration's position on the climate crisis makes it impossible to regard THIS president with respect. Below is the NewEnergyNews theme song until 2020.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

TODAY’S STUDY: The 21ST Century Grid

Electricity is the lifeblood of the modern U.S. economy, yet much of America’s electric grid is outdated and in dire need of investment and expansion to bring it into the 21st Century. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave America’s electricity infrastructure a mark of “D+,” and grid congestion and power outages cost American businesses billions of dollars each year.

To better understand the best way to update and invest in the grid, and any associated consumer benefits, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) undertook a literature review that examines building out the country’s transmission infrastructure. This paper finds investing in upgrading and expanding America’s transmission system will improve electric reliability and resiliency, reduce electricity costs for consumers, bolster national security, reduce environmental impacts, and create jobs and economic development. Dozens of studies confirm that an investment in transmission will pay for itself many times over.

• Expanding the current transmission system network could save consumers as much as $47 billion annually – a roughly 10% reduction in electric bills.1

• Upgraded transmission networks have been proven to reduce consumers’ bills through reduced congestion costs. By expanding transmission, the New England grid operator reduced congestion costs from $600 million per year under $100 million annually following upgrades.2

• Regional power providers have found transmission investments provide benefits 2-4 times greater than their costs.3

• Strengthening the grid by adding network paths significantly increases the system’s resilience to damage and prevents power outages.4

• Kansas utility Westar has seen a 40% reduction in transmission-related customer outages as it expanded its grid.5

• A more robust grid helps protect against and recover from all types of unexpected events, including deliberate attacks on our infrastructure, while a weak and congested grid makes the system vulnerable to disruption.6

Centered around the “Three Ps” of Planning, Paying and Permitting, this paper outlines the policies needed to realize the benefits of an expanded, improved and interconnected transmission system. These initiatives should enjoy support from consumer, pro-market, environmental, national security, and economic development advocates across the country.

• Planning – Transmission planning should look further into the future, proactively incorporate expected future generation additions, and simultaneously account for the multiple benefits of transmission. Planners should work together across states and regions to evaluate interregional transmission solutions, coupled with effective means to pay for those upgrades.

• Paying – The most important policy solution is broad transmission cost allocation to reflect the broadly distributed benefits of transmission, particularly for high-capacity and interregional transmission.

• Permitting – Simplifying the siting of interstate transmission lines. Policies should incentivize states to work together on siting and deploy federal authority where necessary for projects that serve the national interest.

The electric grid underlies nearly all of our modern economy and underpins every aspect of day-to-day American life. We’ve neglected it for far too long, and a 21st Century update will benefit all American families and businesses.

The National Academy of Engineering has concluded that the most important engineering accomplishment of the 20th century was widespread access to electricity through large interconnected power systems. The key factor enabling consumers’ access to low-cost, reliable electricity was the aggregation of electricity supply and demand across wide areas. This was chiefly made possible by the innovations of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who developed the Alternating Current (AC) power transformers and high-voltage electric transmission necessary to efficiently move energy long distances. Our large, aggregated grid provides two critical benefits:

-Economies of scale allow electricity to be cost-effectively generated at large facilities located in favorable locations with low-cost access to fuel.

-Fluctuations in electricity supply and demand from individual power plants and customers are mostly canceled out by opposite changes elsewhere on the network.

These efficiencies explain why Westinghouse’s large interconnected AC system won out over Thomas Edison’s localized system in the “War of the Currents” more than a century ago. Today, large electric grid networks save consumers billions of dollars per year relative to smaller networks.1

The value of a large electricity network can be seen by starting from the extreme case of having no network, which is the case for customers who are “off-grid.” Without a network, an individual customer must meet their electricity needs at all times with their own dedicated energy supply. The challenge is that individual residential, commercial, and industrial users’ electricity demand fluctuates widely over time depending on what appliances are being used, time of day, weather, etc.

Without aggregation, each customer needs an electricity generation source large enough to meet their personal peak electricity demand, and the vast majority of the time their generation resource would sit idle or minimally utilized. Moreover, when their generation source was down for maintenance, a customer would have to either forego using electricity, or bear the cost of owning a fully redundant backup power source at all times.

A network of many customers and sources of supply greatly reduces costs because changes in individual sources of electricity supply and demand are not perfectly correlated. For example, the odds of one neighbor running their clothes dryer at the same time as another are quite low, and when one considers an entire neighborhood of dryers, the odds of them all running at the same time drop to nearly zero. The total electricity demand is always smaller than the sum of every user’s peak demand because these fluctuations are not perfectly correlated and many cancel each other out, reducing the system’s need for supply. Similarly, the odds of several power plants experiencing an unanticipated outage at the same time are very low. When millions of customers and hundreds of power plants are aggregated on a large power system, the statistical diversity is even greater, significantly reducing the cost of building and operating the power system.

Department of Energy (DOE) data illustrate this benefit of a large power system.2 The following map shows the individual grid operators and the three main interconnections (East, West, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT) that make up the U.S. power system. At any point in time, some grid operators are experiencing more electricity demand than was forecast the day ahead (indicated by darker shades of red), while others are experiencing less demand than expected (darker shades of blue). If sufficient transmission capacity is available, grid operators are able to exchange power with their neighbors to net out those deviations, reducing the need for one operator to ramp up its power plants while another ramps down its power plants.

Due to this regional diversity, the total electricity demand forecast error for the whole U.S. power system is typically about 1/5th as large as the sum of the errors for all individual grid operators. Transmission connections among regions reduce the amount of spare power plant capacity each grid operator must hold as operating reserves to accommodate those deviations.

An even larger benefit is that not all regions experience peak electricity demand at the same time. For example, many northern regions experience peak demand in the winter, while many southern regions experience their annual peak demand in the summer. This is due to their different weather profiles and use of electricity for heating and cooling. With adequate transmission, grid operators can use imports and exports from their neighbors to help meet peak demand, saving billions of dollars per year by not having to build as many power plants. Transmission also provides this benefit within a single grid operating area. The grid operator for the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region has found that coincident peak demand across its footprint is 33,000 MW less than the sum of the non-coincident peak demands of its individual utility members, and 6,000 MW less than the sum of the peaks across its larger demand zones.3

The same principle of statistical aggregation through a market-based network is the foundation of many peer-to-peer businesses, including ride-sharing and car-sharing applications like Uber, Lyft, and car2go. Most cars sit idle the vast majority of the time, wasting expensive resources. To borrow the power system term for the amount of time a resource is utilized relative to its maximum theoretical utilization, the “capacity factor” of cars is very low. In addition, while any one car is occasionally unavailable due to planned or unplanned maintenance, a fleet of cars made available through a network will almost always have a car available. Ride-sharing and car-sharing use the Internet to create networked markets that increase the capacity factors of underutilized assets and reduce the total need for cars and parking spots, just as a networked power grid achieves a higher utilization and reduced need for power plants by netting out fluctuations in individual sources of supply and demand across large geographical areas.

The value of making power systems larger and more integrated is driven by the powerful fundamental principles of statistical aggregation and economies of scale. Efforts to work against those principles by “cutting the cord” from the network will always face an uphill battle, despite advances in technology for energy storage and microgrids. As technology changes our sources of electricity supply and demand, the value of large grids is increasing rather than decreasing… click here for more

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.

As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.

In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.

As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.

Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.

Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman

"...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.

The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.

She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.

In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.

There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.

In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.

Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."

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